The number of computer applications used by large corporations has increased significantly over the past twenty years. For example, companies may employ separate applications for electronic mail, document control, financial applications, inventory management, manufacturing control and engineering functions, in addition to overall network access. Each application may, include numerous modules and screens, each with one or more functions. Due to numerous regulatory and business requirements, maintaining records of use of computer systems by multiple users, each with varying access privileges and functional capabilities, many applications include auditing features that track an individual's use of that application. However, each application often requires a separate administrative function to define, store, and distribute user privileges and monitor the audit logs associated with the users.
From a management perspective, it is very cumbersome to capture and extract meaningful information about one particular user's activities across audit logs from multiple systems on an application by application basis. Indeed, on some legacy applications, it not even possible to capture such data without rewriting the application. Furthermore, the need to implement processes for each new application added by an organization is often repetitive of processes already in place for other applications. The user faces similar challenges in tracking activities across multiple web sites or applications, particularly when only a subset of the actions are of interest. For example, a user may be interested in all the financial transactions processed at multiple financial web sites, but not in tracking the downloading of content or balance inquiries. Indeed, the multitude of computer applications a user interacts with on a daily basis makes it both cumbersome and expensive to accurately track activity, and extract relevant data from the audit logs.